I'm a datajack and I'm okay, I work with numbers night and day….

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Why we’re going to #opendatacamp

On Saturday and Sunday fellow Tableau Zen Master, Rob Radburn and I will be attending Open Data Camp in Cardiff.

So why are we spending a Saturday and Sunday in Cardiff away from our families and spending a small fortune on hotels?

Well sometimes data visualisation can be frustrating. We’re both prominent members of the Tableau Community and we’ve spent countless hours producing visualisations for our own projects as well as community initiatives such as Makeover Monday and Iron Viz. There’s lots of fun and rewards for this work, both personally and professionally and so why is it frustrating? Well shouldn’t there be more to data visualisation than just producing a visualisations for consumption on Twitter? How do we do produce something meaningful and useful (long term) through data and visualisations?

Open Data seems a suitable answer however with so many data sets, potential questions and applications it’s hard to know where to start. The open data community have done a great job at securing access to many important datasets but I’ve seen little useful visualisation / applications of open datasets in the UK beyond a few key datasets. How do we do more?

Tableau Public on the other hand has done a fantastic job of ensuring free access to data visualisation for all, but few in the community have worked with the open data community to enable the delivery of open data through the platform.

Rob and I are hoping that our pitch at Open Data Camp will facilitate a discussion around bridging the gap between the Tableau Community and the Open Data Community. On the one side we have a heap of engaged and talented data viz practitioners on Tableau Public looking for problems, on the other hand a ton of data with people screaming for help understanding it….on the face of it there seems some exciting possibilities, we just need to pick through the .

Oh and while we’re there if anyone wants us to pitch a Tableau Introduction and / or Intro to Data Visualisation we’d be happy to facilitate a discussion around that too.